Near-Miss
by Haberdashing
Summary: Transcendence AU. Dipper stumbles upon a reincarnation of one whose soul he hadn't encountered in some time.


"Here to see Mister Pines again, sir?"

Dipper nodded, trying to stop his now human-looking eyes from filling with golden tears.

"He's been moved to room 618. Just take the elevator up to the sixth floor and it's the third room on the left."

He nodded and walked over to the elevator, trying to keep his mind focused on something, anything, besides the reason for his visiting this place once more.

Dipper was getting sick of hospitals. Of their walls painted in shades of white or off-white calculated to be as neutral and unemotional as possible, of the smells that were sterile and chemical at best, and, most of all, of the illness that loomed across every corner, portending death that would eventually reach all of his loved ones but never, it seemed, himself.

He could have just floated up to the sixth floor, he knew. But taking the elevator was what normal human people did, and right now, he was trying to act like normal human people. If he was trying to seem ordinary to all but the one who was the reason for his visit, well, best to stay in-character, lest he slip up and draw attention to himself.

The elevator opened immediately after he called for it, apparently having been waiting on the ground floor seemingly just for him. As he stepped on, pushing the button for the sixth floor and watching it fill with a soft white light, the elevator remained blissfully empty.

Just as the door began to close, though, a dark-haired woman in light green scrubs dashed towards him, shouting, "Wait! Hold the door!"

As he did so and the woman came rushing in, Dipper was hit with a vague sense of nostalgia. He'd known her, somewhere, somehow, once upon a time. But he couldn't put his finger on how, the only sign of their connection being a niggling sense of familiarity.

The elevator crawled its way upwards as the woman jabbed at the button that the demon had already pressed, as though the added gesture would make it ascend more quickly to their shared destination. Normally, Dipper might have been irritated at the elevator's slowness, but right now he was grateful for the time to think.

Her soul wasn't Mabel's- her latest reincarnation was safe in her home hundreds of miles away. Not Henry's, either- even if he couldn't recognize Henry's soul right off the bat anyway, the antlers would have been a dead giveaway. But there were so many others that he'd encountered over the years, friends, family, acquaintances or summoners, that might trigger the same sense of uncertain recognition.

One way to settle the matter, then.

As she stood in the opposite end of the elevator, humming softly and staring resolutely at the door rather than meeting his perplexed gaze, he took a peek into her previous lives. At a glance, he saw a few glimpses of each incarnation and learned of who their soul had inhabited generations earlier.

A freckle-covered travel writer turned war correspondent who had died in a plane crash, obliterating not only his body but the notes he'd prepared for his latest article- Dipper saw his fossil collection from childhood, watched the burning of the bonfire he'd set to dispose of notes from a hated chemistry course. A dark-eyed child prodigy who'd been hailed as the next Einstein before crashing her car into a tree in the middle of finals- he saw her cry herself to sleep after her first crush rejected her. A rotund children's book author who passed away just after witnessing the birth of her first grandchild- her father had slapped her hard enough to leave a mark when she'd told him she didn't want to go into the family business. A raggedy-haired scientist who died before getting the chance to research the wonders of the post-Transcendence world- he'd spent hours one afternoon seeing how tall he could make a sandcastle before it inevitably collapsed. A mathematician with...

Wait. Was that his own face- his _human_ face- that Dipper had just seen flicker by?

The memory flew past as Dipper tried to place it, but as he concentrated, more events flickered by, each one as vivid as if he himself had just lived through them. A young girl ripping a failed history test to shreds, crunching the shreds into a ball, and chucking it into the nearest trash bin as tears streamed down her face. A man rocking a child to sleep, singing lullabies with half the words invented on the spot. Yanking a flower from a neighbor's rosebush and pulling it apart petal by petal until nothing was left but a bare stem. Chalk dust tickling a man's nose, the resulting sneeze blurring the numbers on a chalkboard and propelling even more dust into the air. Picking up a gun from the ground and hoping that its heat was solely from the desert sun. Flipping through yellowed pages in a room lit by dim blue light. A boat rocking violently back and forth, the sky filled with dark clouds and lit only by the occasional streak of lightning.

And finally, finally, the names. The doctor with which he was sharing the elevator was named Sofia Hernandez. The journalist was Terrence Jensen- and Dipper realized that he'd come across that name before, that he'd written a travel blurb about Gravity Falls that had been featured in the local newspaper, that he and Mabel had joked about how he would've had a very different perspective on the town if he had bumped into them. The child prodigy was Liza Perez, and the children's book author was Stella Lund, whose book _The Lamb and the Butterfly_ Willow had read to the younger members of the Pleiades time and time again. And the scientist was...

" _Stanford_." Dipper muttered.

Sofia's head whipped around to face him, wide eyes giving way to a tilted head and a bemused look.

"If you're here for Stanford Harper, he's actually in Room 231, not on the sixth floor."

It didn't take long for the demon to do the mental calculations. Born the year after the Transcendence, and the plane crash ending his life in his late thirties... that meant that Terrence Jensen had passed away even before Grunkle Stan. How close had they come to one another during the travel writer's time in Gravity Falls? Had Grunkle Stan passed by the man with his brother's soul without knowing it, without even blinking an eye?

Dipper shook his head.

"No, I was just thinking of... someone I used to know."

"Oh." The woman's features softened, her mouth forming a tense, thin smile. Dipper wondered how many people she'd bestowed that smile upon as she'd watched their loved ones die. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be." Could she see the tears welling up in his eyes? Could she tell that they were the wrong color?

The elevator dinged, and the doors opened.

He extended his arm to indicate that the woman should go first, and she didn't hesitate before taking him up on the offer, sprinting off into the hallway to meet her next patient. Before stepping off himself, Dipper watched her until she turned the corner, thinking of all that had been and all that might have been.


End file.
